Tlatelolco Massacre Research Articles

Imagined Past and Future

Aztech Forgotten Gods, developed by Mexican studio Lienzo, has as its main setting a futuristic unconquered Aztec civilization. The developers took elements from the pre-Hispanic past and projected them into an imagined alternative future. Following this premise, the present article borrows from Penix-Tadsen the division of “the culture in the video game/the video game in the culture” and thus is divided into two parts. The first traces some of the cultural notions present in Aztech that can be found by examining some ideologies with an origin in the Mexican Post-Revolutionary regime from the 1920s. Initially, these ideologies considered the pre-Hispanic era as a “glorious past”; thereafter, toward the 1970s with the Tlatelolco massacre and economic crises, the past was rather seen as “tragic.” These ideologies are also related to ways of thinking about pre-Hispanic culture in relation to other beliefs and religions, or with a desire to “recover” the “Aztec” culture and essentialize it. The second part of this article categorizes and analyzes some of the contemporary cultural notions activated by Aztech Forgotten Gods. This is achieved by analyzing the reactions of internet users to the promotional videos of the video game on YouTube. These responses include the identification of some people as Mexican and their relation to ancient “Aztec” culture, similarities of the game’s music to the music from other video games, and issues of gender representation. The article discusses the complexities that come when a video game takes some aspects from contemporary identity, and some of the different ways the audience responds to cultural aspects of a video game. That is to say, it is fundamentally concerned with the relation between culture and video games.

Medals, Rings, and Olympic Dreams: A Review Essay of Antonio Sotomayor and Cesar R. Torres, eds., Olimpismo

Medals, Rings, and Olympic Dreams: A Review Essay of Antonio Sotomayor and Cesar R. Torres, eds., <i>Olimpismo</i>

South-South Solidarity and the Latin American Left

Most studies of international solidarity focus on movements connecting the global North and South, sidelining the vital connections within the South. While revolutionaries have long prioritized both North-South and South-South relationships, academics have been slower to catch on. Only recently have we begun to give “South-South solidarity” the attention it merits.Jessica Stites Mor's study examines South-South solidarity movements involving the Latin American Left, primarily during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This was the heyday of internationalism driven by radical visions of anti-imperialism and socialism. South-South cooperation took new form following the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, and the 1966 formation of the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAAL). Cuba in particular supported anticolonial and anticapitalist struggles across Africa and Latin America. Meanwhile, nonrevolutionary states and private institutions like the Catholic Church scrambled to fend off revolutionary change through a combination of reform and repression.Despite the book's narrow temporal frame, its scope is ambitious. It tackles four very different cases of South-South connections using archives from eight countries. The first chapter addresses Mexico's protection of Chilean political refugees after the 1973 coup. This policy followed an effort by Mexican legal scholars and certain regime officials to strengthen international asylum law by asserting the right of receiving countries to determine the validity of claims. Though some of these advocates had principled motives, the regime was also concerned with “shoring up domestic support” following the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre (p. 185n9). As many have noted, Mexico's less-than-revolutionary regime sought to boost its tarnished legitimacy by opposing some aspects of US imperialism in Latin America. It was essentially forced to practice some level of solidarity in the interest of maintaining power. And even that posture had major limits: for example, the regime simultaneously collaborated with Washington by sharing intel on Cubans and waging a brutal counterinsurgency in Guerrero state.OSPAAAL's artistic production is the topic of chapter 2. Stites Mor analyzes the organization's printed materials, which were designed in Cuba and disseminated around the world. Posters promoted solidarity with revolutionaries in Vietnam, South Africa, Palestine, Yemen, and elsewhere. Although these materials have been discussed in other studies, the visual analysis of the artists' decisions is a valuable contribution. The chapter reflects one of Stites Mor's overarching arguments, about how “representational solidarity” aimed to forge a shared revolutionary imaginary (p. 20).Chapter 3 addresses a more neglected case: the Argentine Left's solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle. Unlike OSPAAAL art, which was accompanied by Cuban material assistance to revolutionary movements, Argentines' use of representational solidarity was “mostly symbolic” (p. 124). They championed the Palestinian cause largely as a way to unify the domestic Left around a common agenda. This is an example of how domestic politics informs international solidarity, which is a common thread across all four case studies. The chapter also draws an insightful contrast with the Chilean Left. Stites Mor argues that the presence in Chile of a conservative Palestinian immigrant population, including many vocal capitalists, slowed the growth of solidarity efforts as compared with Argentina.The global transmission of liberation theology, another understudied question, is the focus of the final chapter. Stites Mor shows that Latin American articulations of liberation theology had a significant impact in apartheid South Africa. Antiapartheid activists read and circulated the writings of Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, for example. The chapter says rather little about direct relationships between South Africans and Latin Americans, though it does suggest how ideas were transmitted via publications.Such a wide-ranging book is bound to have some limitations. It focuses on the discourse of solidarity emanating from top figures; it says less about the organizing of material solidarity, about how rank-and-file activists understood solidarity, or about how survivors view that era and its legacies. Oral histories might have offered insight into these questions. South-South solidarity in other times and places, such as Central America in the 1980s, is not addressed in any depth. In short, there is much research still to be done. This book's welcome reframing of solidarity should help inspire that work.

La masacre de Tlatelolco y los gobiernos de los Estados Unidos de América y de Gran Bretaña

The presented article analyzes the international dimension of the so-called Tlatelolco massacre of 1968. It focuses on the diplomatic reaction of two of Mexico’s neighbors, the United States of America and the United Kingdom that still held its colony of British Honduras. This topic has been neglected by historiography so far. It is based on the archival resources from British National Archives in Kew and online declassified American documents available thanks to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The reaction of both governments was minimal and relatively calm because they understood the massacre did not endanger their strong ally Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and the students’ protests were not anti-American nor anti-British. Similarly, there was a vague connection to the international communist movement, and no countries from the communist camp were directly involved. The only difference we could find was in the evaluation of the massacre. The British saw it as an opportunity for further democratization of Mexico, i.e., they took a more normative stance. The Americans approached the situation more pragmatically. They were supportive of the undemocratic regime as long as it took an anti-communist stance.

Reckoning with Tlatelolco: Arturo Rosenblueth and a Cybernetic Rhetoric

Abstract This essay examines the cybernetic rhetoric of Dr. Arturo Rosenblueth, a cybernetician and prominent Mexican intellectual. Published in a journal reaffirming Mexico's political image in the aftermath of the Tlatelolco Massacre in 1968, his essay offered a counter to one of the government's rationales for the violence enacted against the movimiento estudiantil at Tlatelolco—the influence of el extranjero. Rosenblueth's essay evinced a mediating path between complete disavowal of Mexico's statist tendencies and support for the Mexican state in post-Tlatelolco Mexico. Yet, in invoking cybernetics as a rhetoric for public intervention in this moment of crisis, I argue that Rosenblueth's use of cybernetics both empowered his proposals calling for an adjustment to perceptions of el extranjero and supported the survival of a strong Mexican state enacting violence against it. I conclude from my reading of Rosenblueth's essay that the political possibilities of cybernetic rhetoric lie not only on the cybernetician's ideological commitments or political context(s) but by a plasticity constitutive of cybernetics.

In Combat: The Life of Lombardo Toledano

In Combat: The Life of Lombardo Toledano

Blood Carnival and its Variations in Mexican and Soviet Subversive Satires by René Avilés and Fazil Iskander

Abstract This article examines blood carnival metaphors in order to understand how they reflect different interpretations of the nature of violence, the role of state actors and of the people in state violence, and the role of intellectuals in society. In Rabbits and Boa Constrictors (1982), the Soviet satirist Fazil Iskander uses the title's creatures as allegories for Joseph Stalin and his associates as well as the corrupt society that supported and transcended his rule. The satire The Great Solitaire of the Palace (1971) by René Avilés Fabila deals with the Tlatelolco Massacre (Mexico, 1968), in which hundreds of student protesters were shot by security forces and it confronts decades of authoritarianism under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Animal allegories play a key part in these novels’ condemnation of violence and their attempt to ridicule their leaders. These novels represent carnival on the diegetic and the extra-diegetic levels: The diegeses depict historical events as blood carnivals, and the narratives themselves adopt subversive, carnivalesque features. This study identifies three variations of the blood carnival metaphor: (a) the violent disruption of a festivity, (b) covert violence that takes place during a celebration, and (c) ritualized social action that involves violent excesses.

Agrarian Revolt in the Sierra of Chihuahua, 1959–1965

In this solidly researched and well-written monograph, Elizabeth Henson offers the first English-language work about the radical agrarian movement in Chihuahua's Sierra Tarahumara in the 1960s, an episode that produced the first socialist guerrilla movement in Mexican history. The originality of Henson's work lies in her primary sources. She consulted archives in Chihuahua state and was one of the first historians to explore the declassified archives of the Secretariat of the Interior at the General Archive of Mexico. Also, while oral history was not her focus because of bureaucratic constraints, Henson used published interviews, testimonies, and memoirs.Until the turn of the century, the scholarly production on Cold War Mexico had minimized the so-called socialist armed movement, describing it as a byproduct of the Cuban Revolution or the radical Left's overreaction after the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. The assault on the military barracks in Madera on September 23, 1965, by the Popular Guerrilla Group (GPG), was not a part of collective memory beyond the town where it took place. However, Madera marked the beginning of the socialist armed struggle and also inaugurated the dirty war, a period of focalized state terror and human rights violations that the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party concealed through psychological warfare and media censorship.In the late 1990s, the Mexican novelist Carlos Montemayor became the first public intellectual to write about the socialist armed movement, breaking a veil of silence about the Madera events. However, Montemayor's emphasis on the armed character of Chihuahua's popular insurgency downplayed the role of the radical agrarian movement and its alliance with the student movement. The first scholarly works on this topic (by Marco Bellingeri, Alberto López Limón, and Jesús Vargas Valdés) explained peasant unrest in teleological terms, assuming the preeminence of the guerrilla movement. Only Aleida García Aguirre's 2015 book considered the radical agrarianism and the guerrilla foco to be equally important. Henson provides a new approach to this historiography. She claims that her primary interest is the public, direct action aspect of the agrarian movement, which was more heterogenous, massive, and inclusive of women than the armed component (p. 5). Henson rejects the idea that direct action was less revolutionary than armed struggle, and she shows that both strategies entailed similar risks: prison, torture, assassination, and displacement.Henson demonstrates that political violence in postrevolutionary Chihuahua was a continuation of a long-standing tradition of elite violence followed by armed self-defense, from the nineteenth-century Tomochic rebellion to the 1910 revolution. Notwithstanding that the latter began in Chihuahua due to the extreme concentration of land in few latifundia, landowners who survived the upheaval, new caciques, and even thugs like the infamous José Ibarra encroached on land that was intended for ejidos or new population centers. The agrarian movement, which emerged as a response to landowners' violence and the government's corruption, resorted to radical means to enforce the constitution.Henson argues that unlike the primarily student-based armed vanguards that emerged across Latin America in the Cuban Revolution's aftermath without a social base, the GPG grew from this endemic agrarian movement. The GPG's leader, Arturo Gámiz, had previously led thousands of landless peasants who participated in the General Union of Workers and Peasants of Mexico. Henson's sources reveal that peasants failed to follow the GPG because they had grown weary of violence, which explains the paradox of the guerrillas' isolation despite their popularity.Henson departs from previous interpretations of the GPG by portraying it as a product of ideologization, voluntarism, and faith in Che Guevara's foquismo; she concludes that the formation of a revolutionary vanguard was a political mistake. However, Henson's analysis of the short-lived guerrilla movement's outcomes is ambiguous. On the one hand she claims that the GPG's activities thwarted the dynamics of the radical agrarian movement, but on the other hand she suggests that the federal government solved long-lasting agrarian petitions after the Madera assault as a way to curtail further violence. Although the guerrilla foco proved to be a failure, the GPG forced the government to change its strategy and set limits to elite power; therefore, it is problematic to imply that Gámiz's group should not have followed the armed path.While Henson focuses on the history of the eastern highlands of the Sierra Tarahumara—including detailed biographies and vignettes of every relevant actor and a tracing of the complex map of the Left—she also describes the context of Chihuahua and Mexico, underscoring the connections between the landed and industrial elites and the state and federal authorities as well as the broader impact and legacy of the agrarian revolt. In sum, this book provides both a useful introduction to Cold War Mexico for students and an in-depth case study of postrevolutionary violence for specialists in social and armed movements.

Humanity and revolution in José Fuentes Mares’La joven Antígona se va a la guerra

AbstractJosé Fuentes Mares’ La joven Antígona se va a la guerra (‘Young Antigone Goes to War’) is a Mexican adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone written and first performed in 1968. The play, full of unique accomplishments, demonstrates a deep engagement with the Sophoclean original and has a complex original performance context. It premiered a week after the biggest student massacre in Mexican history, the Tlatelolco Massacre of 2 October 1968. In this article, I bring attention to Fuentes Mares’ work as an exceptional contribution to the Latin American reception of Sophocles’ Antigone. I detail the play’s explicit invitations to be read against Sophocles’ original and highlight the playwright’s choices to reframe Antigone’s resistance by reworking long-standing dualisms. I argue that Fuentes Mares’ adaptation of Antigone advises introspection, compassion, and endurance in the face of violent oppression. This function differs from other Latin American adaptations of Antigone, which tend to give a voice to the marginalized with calls for organized social action or pleas for the acknowledgment of ongoing abuses. This analysis should help expand our understanding of the reception of Sophocles’ Antigone as a multifaceted instrument varying in its response to oppressions throughout Latin America.

Memórias da violência em “Amuleto” de Roberto Bolaño

Este ensaio objetiva apresentar uma análise da violência presente no livro “Amuleto” do escritor chileno Roberto Bolaño. O romance está contextualizado no início da década de 1970, momento de grandes tensões políticas e de significativa violência no México e do início da ditadura militar-empresarial chilena (1973-1990). Os regimes ditatoriais, embora em circunstâncias diferentes, foram (e são ainda) episódios marcantes que unem os países latino-americanos. Identificaremos as diversas formas de violência ocorridas na América Latina, especificamente, no Chile e no México durante o período mencionado, assim como, qual a relação entre a política e a literatura presentes na referida obra. Os atuais discursos políticos que circulam em nossa sociedade sinalizam que grande parte da população brasileira provavelmente ignora parte significativa da história, inclusive do Brasil, nas décadas de 1960/1970, ou seja, a memória produzida sobre este período não deu conta de fazer conhecer os horrores e as atrocidades cometidos durante os mais de 20 anos de governo militar no país. A partir da abordagem do lugar da poesia e dos poetas na década de 1970, a narradora de Amuleto versa sobre seu papel de defensora da poesia e da memória política do México e do Chile de meados do século XX, de forma indissociável. Com seu discurso circular, calcado na reiteração de eventos traumáticos que presenciou, em especial, à invasão à UNAM, o Massacre de Tlatelolco (1968) e o golpe militar chileno (1973). Neste último fato, relatado pelo personagem Arturo Belano, há um trabalho de escavação memorialística, tanto nas ocorrências históricas mencionadas, como dos intentos poéticos do distrito federal mexicano. Os jovens poetas narrados pela protagonista defendiam o livre trânsito entre vida e poesia, se opunham aos moldes acadêmicos vigentes encarnados na figura de Octavio Paz, como também do poder hegemônico. O movimento poético desses jovens latino-americanos da década de 1970 agrega as muitas inquietações dos seus integrantes. A paixão pela poesia é o princípio básico que dá unidade ao grupo que buscava em cada ato e em cada verso um novo modo de explicar o mundo através de uma poesia sem burocracias, sem espaços de poder e legitimações padronizadas. Este estudo contribui para a indispensabilidade de se manter vivos os horrores e traumas que aconteceram durante os regimes autoritários e as ditaduras militares na América Latina e suas reverberações, considerando, sobretudo, que a memória pode ser um potente instrumento utilizado na reconstrução da história. Serão utilizados textos teóricos e críticos de Paul Ricoeur (1996), Nascimento (2008), Seligmann-Silva (2003), Sarlo (2007) e Rojo (2012), Bolognese (2009), Villarreal (2011), entre outros.

Guest editorial

The year 1968 was a momentous year of spontaneous rebellion around the world. Throughout that year, a wave of protests by environmental, civil rights, anti-war and pro-equality movements swept the world (Kurlansky, 2005). A disproportionally large number of these protests was organised or supported by university students (Werenskjold, 2010), culminating in, e.g. the “May event” in France or the “Tlatelolco massacre” in Mexico. Environmental movements, civil rights movements, anti-capitalist and anti-communist movements, and other emancipatory movements that are concerned with what we now call sustainable development, can trace their origins or rallying point to 1968 (Klimke and Scharloth, 2008). Paradoxically, this revolt may have destabilised progressive politics while unifying conservatives, paving the way for the current global neoliberal clamp-down (Ferhat, 2019; Harvey, 2007; Hilton, 2016).

Modern Mexican Culture: Critical Foundations ed. by Stuart A. Day

Reviewed by: Modern Mexican Culture: Critical Foundations ed. by Stuart A. Day Rebecca Janzen Day, Stuart A., editor. Modern Mexican Culture: Critical Foundations. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2017. 330 pp. ISBN: 978-08-1653-426-5. Day's edited collection surveys aspects of Mexican culture. Its definition of Mexican culture is vast, including print culture, such as novels, as well as visual culture, which encompasses art and film, and new media. Each chapter in Modern Mexican Culture centers around a single topic. Analisa Taylor's, for instance, focuses on "Milpa," Jacqueline E. Bixler's on "1968," and Dana A. Meredith and Luis Alberto Rodríguez Cortés on "Feminicide." The chapters also have subtitles that point to their dialogue with existing scholarship. In the case of "Milpa," Taylor has given the subtitle, "Mesoamerican Resistance to Agricultural Imperialism." This is followed by a list of primary materials, such as films, artwork or literary texts. The chapter then explains how these primary materials relate to Mexico's social, political and historical context. Modern Mexican Culture includes contributions by well-known scholars, such as Jacqueline E. Bixler, Robert McKee Irwin, Ryan Long, Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, and Emily Hind alongside of works by emerging scholars, like David S. Dalton. This variety of scholarship is one of its strengths. At the same time, even though several scholars received their early academic training in Mexico, all of these scholars are currently based in the US academy. This is likely because the approach to the collection is one primarily adopted by the US academy. Day introduces the structure of the book and surveys Mexican history. He skillfully describes how he has already used these strategies in his classroom, and the ways that he has already made these topics come alive for his students by relating them to current social issues in the US. At the same time, Day tries to do justice to Mexican history in a few pages, and makes some remarks more appropriate to a specialized audience, such as jumping from the issue of impunity after the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968 to impunity in Mexico in the first decades of the twenty-first century. The work continues with Marta Caminero-Santangelo's chapter, titled, "DREAM-ers," subtitled, "Youth and Migration: American DREAMers and Mexico," and begins with a list of relevant novels, films, cartoons, and testimonies. She then offers a historical [End Page 141] context of the failed DREAM act and elaborates on the problems with the narrative of the good immigrant. She discusses some of the primary materials, such as Julia Álvarez's novel, Return to Sender and Gabriela Adera et al.'s collection of testimonies of undocumented students at UCLA. She concludes by considering those DREAMers who have returned to Mexico, the increasing presence of unaccompanied minors in the US, and questions of how cultural production around immigration might develop following the election of the current president of the US. The book then moves to Analisa Taylor's work on "Milpa. Mesoamerican Resistance to Agricultural Imperialism," which analyzes posters from resistance movements to agri-business. Christopher Conway's chapter on charros follows this intervention. He successfully demonstrates the ways that the charro has become a complex symbol of Mexican nationalism that relates to Mexican gender ideals. His notes at the end of the chapter are especially helpful to introduce the topic to scholars beginning to approach Mexico. The collection then focuses explicitly on earlier decades of the twentieth century. Ryan Long's chapter, "Print," for instance, discusses the Taller de Gráfica Popular and the circulation of images from this workshop from the 1930s to the 1950s. This chapter sheds light on an understudied art movement and includes several images. Long ties their linocuts and posters to famous Mexican muralists, and convincingly demonstrates that their work —although promoting Mexican state ideology—confronted global fascism. Following Long's contribution, Dalton discusses the role of education in the Revolution, and, in a welcome departure from typical discussions on the topic, relates rural teachers and Juan Rulfo's short stories. Then, Fernando Fabio Sánchez analyzes murder and democracy in Mexico, expertly using key works to analyze specific periods in the twentieth century...

Héctor Manjarrez’s Uncertainty; or, Politics Without Dogma

Héctor Manjarrez’s fictional worlds are populated by characters who are uncertain about their place in the Mexican Student Movement of 1968 both before and after the massacre at Tlatelolco on October 2. In contrast to the certainty that underscores the Mexican state’s paternalistic prescriptions, exclusions, and violence in the mid-twentieth century, this essay analyzes how Manjarrez deploys uncertainty in order to restore the potential for a democratizing politics. Through an analysis of París desaparece (2014), Pasaban en silencio nuestros dioses (1987), as well as the short story, “Johnny,” from Acto propiciatorio (1970), this essay explores Manjarrez’s attempt to construct secularized narratives of 1968 that resist defining the Tlatelolco massacre as a necessary sacrifice for future redemption. Building from that violent defeat, Manjarrez sheds the disillusionment of his generation and mobilizes literature to search for new political alternatives. Thus the literary becomes an important site from which to think and narrate a radically democratic politics for the left by making room for the contradictions and everyday indecisions of human beings whose uncertainty exceeds their dogmatic desires and programs.

The “critical current” in Mexican social anthropology vs. the indigenista establishment in the aftermath of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre: an outsider’s view

The “critical current” in Mexican social anthropology vs. the indigenista establishment in the aftermath of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre: an outsider’s view

Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside, by Alexander Aviña

In the 1960s and ’70s much of Latin America languished under military-authoritarian regimes which brutally repressed political opponents, real and imagined, often justifying these guerras sucias (‘dirty wars’) in the name of peace, order, Christianity and anti-Communism. Mexico, in contrast, remained a civilian polity, ruled by a dominant party, the PRI, which claimed the patriotic and progressive mantle of the Mexican Revolution of 1910; indeed, Mexico became a haven for Argentine and Chilean political refugees, as it had for Spanish Republicans a generation earlier. The PRI prided itself on its revolutionary legitimacy and provision of politico-economic stability; so, many wrongly concluded, repression was no more than a sporadic aberration (the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre being the biggest aberrant example). Recent research, helped by the opening of sensitive security archives after 2000, has shown that repression was more severe and systematic than had previously been thought (if more discreet than in South America: Tlatelolco, a massacre in downtown Mexico City, was, in that sense, a real exception).

Os Jogos Olímpicos na Cidade do México 1968: discursos oficiais, da mídia e da literatura científica

ResumoO presente artigo propõe uma análise histórica sobre os principais fatos relacionados à candidatura, eleição e realização dos Jogos Olímpicos de 1968 na Cidade do México, verificando a presença ou ausência desses e de outros debates no jornal Folha de S.Paulo do ano de 1968, nos relatórios oficiais emitidos pelo Comitê Organizador do evento e na literatura científica. Assim, foram identificados e descritos o processo de candidatura e eleição da Cidade do México, assim como os debates acerca da altitude e as manifestações político-sociais durante o processo de preparação e realização do evento - especificamente ao chamado Massacre de Tlatelolco e ao ato de levantar os punhos dos atletas Tommy Smith e John Carlos no pódio olímpico. Sem a pretensão de esgotar a descrição dos acontecimentos daquele evento, tais fatos apontam para relevantes indícios daquela edição dos Jogos Olímpicos. Apesar da especificidade histórica daquele contexto político e esportivo, alguns debates permanecem como desafios para as cidades sedes e para as instituições esportivas mesmo após quase meio século.

Music and Memory: The Tlatelolco Refrain

Ever since the 1968 student movements and the events surrounding the Tlatelolco massacre, Mexico City rock bands have openly engaged with the intersection of music and memory. Their songs offer audiences a medium through which to come to terms with the events of the past as a means of praising a broken world, to borrow the poet Adam Zagajewski’s phrase. Contemporary songs such as Saúl Hernández’s “Fuerte” are a twenty-first-century voicing of the ceaseless revolutionary spirit that John Gibler has called “Mexico unconquered,” a current of rebellion and social hunger for justice that runs in the veins of Mexican history. They are the latest additions to what we might think about as “the Mexico unconquered songbook”: musical critiques of impunity and state violence that are rooted in the weaponry of memory, refusing to focus solely on the present and instead making connections with the political past. What Octavio Paz described as a “swash of blood” that swept across “the international subculture of the young” during the events in Tlatelolco Plaza on October 2, 1968, now becomes a refrain of musical memory and political consciousness that extends across eras and generations. That famous phrase of Paz’s is a reminder that these most recent Mexican musical interventions, these most recent formations of a Mexican subculture of the young, maintain a historically tested relationship to blood, death, loss, and violence.

HAZEL BARNES AND OCTAVIO PAZ:TWO EXISTENTIALIST AND PAN-AMERICAN PHILOSOPHIES OF EDUCATION

As loyal critics of the university whose worldviews furthered key existentialist commitments, Octavio Paz and Hazel Barnes advanced philosophies of education inspired by the struggles of the 1968 student social protest movements. Their appeals to what a complete university education is and ought be demonstrate remarkable compatibility given their existentialist affinities and so are relevant to a normative critique of the mission of today's colleges and universities. Both took seriously the idea that the university's didactic mission should include the ideal of cultivating a socially and politically desirable, and morally defensible, account of the individual self in action. These thinkers also contended that the university should be seen as a place where selves in action rehearse engaged moral reflection towards self-fulfillment and social justice across generations. Seen against the violence that marred such episodes as the police riots during the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August 1968 and the Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico City weeks later, my argument demonstrates how and why the radical normative underpinning of Barnes' and Paz's philosophies of education offer important guidelines for appraising the purposive nature of today's university. One key outcome of my paper is that it points the way towards what I will call a pan-American existentialist philosophy of education that is responsive to the generational needs, ideals, and challenges of students today across the universities, communities, and nations of the western hemisphere, especially between the United States and Mexico.

The 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre: The Cold War's Politicization and Internationalization of Everyday Life

Although the colossal ideological struggle between the U.S. and the Soviets raged and ravished the peripheral nations of the world and left no space unaffected, perhaps no other country in the world responded, reacted to, and altered the context of the Cold War in a more complex fashion than Mexico. Within this encompassing global context, the mindsets of both the students murdered and those directing the killings in the Plaza of the Three Cultures were molded less by the dictates of Moscow or Washington than by the more decentralized and localized ideologies, plans of action, and policies which evolved in the shadow of the macro level of the titanic superpower struggle. In this shadow world, the discontent of students grew to be global, disaffected, and revolutionary. The consequences of Mexico's Cold War politicization and internationalization of everyday life unfolded throughout the summer of 1968 and culminated on the night of October 2nd at La Plaza de las Tres Culturas at Tlatelolco, Mexico City. On this night a student demonstration was to end in a hail of bullets. When the shooting ended, hundreds of people would lay dead or wounded; Army and police forces apprehended many of the survivors; now subjected to interrogation.

Renegotiating Patriarchal Power: The Tlatelolco Massacre and Mexican Cinema

Renegotiating Patriarchal Power: The Tlatelolco Massacre and Mexican Cinema